Video: How to Clean a Skull (Hint: Flesh-Eating Beetles)

BERKELEY, California — If you want to save a biological specimen for science, you can’t just toss it a cabinet. There’s a science to preservation and nowhere practices it better than at the University of California, Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.

Housing hundreds of thousands of specimens, the museum has been at the forefront of preservation techniques since it was founded in 1908. For example, the MVZ pioneered the technique of using flesh-eating beetles to clean the skeletons of small mammals. Depending on how hungry the beetles are, it can take as little as 24 hours for them to strip the meat from the skull of a small mammal.

In this video (which is safe for work but probably not for the squeamish), we take you on a step-by-step tour of the preservation process.

“If you’re going to kill something, you want to maximize the potential use of it, not just for today, but forever,” said Jim Patton, the director emeritus of the museum.

The MVZ isn’t open to the public, but Wired Science toured its hallowed vaults to give you a peek inside a working zoology research facility. In Part 1 of this video series, we present the bone and fur rooms, which store large mammal parts. In the third video, we will look into the significance of the collection and how it has been used as a massive dataset for observing climate change.